Wigmore Hall, London
This absorbing recital shone a light on some of the composer’s lesser known songs
Baritone Christian Gerhaher’s two recitals with his regular pianist Gerold Huber at the Wigmore Hall this week are devoted to Schumann. Not the most familiar Schumann songs, though the second programme does include the settings of poems by Eichendorff that make up the Op 39 Liederkreis, but a number of the other 40-odd collections of songs that Schumann completed between 1840 and 1852.
All of these groups are, Gerhaher insisted in the programme notes he had written for the first recital, song cycles, in which the individual settings are linked by a narrative thread, a common theme, or what he calls “a symmetrical concept with the poetry of ideas”. It’s a repertoire in which Gerhaher is unmatched today, and, as he showed, he has explored all these songs in minute musical and psychological detail, so that his absorption into the particular world of each is complete. His voice may no longer have the velvety sheen one remembers, but it is still a wonderfully flexible instrument, which he uses with acute intelligence, whether delineating the narrative of a miniaturised drama, or colouring every syllable of an achingly expressive declaration of love or loss.
Continue reading...
0 Comments